Zoe Whittall, no credit river

 

April Tornado Watch

COFFEE LID THE COLOUR OF a pinched lip, a spring so avoidant I’m attracted to it. This rain is wet-whispering a menacing taunt. Because a tornado took our barn in 1983, I am untethered by wind. I don’t like the wind, I say, as I make origami hearts on the living room carpet. We got the rug thick, so we could sink into the floor, so it would call us to nap. I order blush and Victorian nightgowns that come in the mail. I pick up my phone between lines. I scroll to feel the weight of me lift. I know he’s beside me but he isn’t. He’s with all the followers. I can never be as simultaneously far away and close as they are. I am just here, in parallel play, with our phones out and our bodies on pause, the wind throwing elbows outside.

From Prince Edward County novelist, poet and television writer Zoe Whittall comes the prose poem memoir no credit river (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024), a book self-described as “a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.” As the first line of the introductory poem-essay, “Ars Poetica / Poem in the Form of a Note Before Reading” begins: “IT IS A CONFUSING THING to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is trauma and the one below thinks everything is trauma.” Approached as a hybrid/memoir through the structures of lyrc/narrative prose poems, this is Whittall’s fourth poetry title, following Pre-cordial Thump (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2008), The Emily Valentine Poems (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2006; reprinted by Invisible Publishing, 2016) and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books, 2001). As the opening piece continues:

Of course a poet likes to be in love. To fall for someone you have to be vulnerable, to hold a teaspoon of existential terror in your mouth and let it go. Intimacy is the only cliff jump I like. Otherwise I’m in a lifelong battle with catastrophic thinking. On his podcast the comedian Marc Maron says the only risks he takes are emotional and I pull over to write that down. Oversimplified attachment theory memes on the internet would say the anxiously attached person is just as afraid of intimacy as her avoidant partner but has someone else to blame for the distance. I started writing this book and stopped prioritizing love because I had a broken heart that bordered on lunacy. That’s a poetic exaggeration but also not. In the spring of 2021 my therapist, through Zoom, said, You’re doing well. You really seem like you have it together. I was telling her that it had been two years since the breakup and I still felt grief. I was holding stones in my palm, telling myself their heaviness was the relationship, and throwing them into the lake to let them go. I watched them sink like a wilful tangible metaphor but they didn’t help. If my therapist is the person I tell the worst things to, and she says I’m doing well post-breakup and miscarriage and rewatching the same Gilmore Girls or Grey’s Anatomy every night over and over, then how can you ever be perceived?

Set with introduction and three numbered sections of shorter pieces, no credit river is constructed through a sequence of self-contained prose poems as a first-person essay/memoir with lyric tilt, offered episodically, each piece unfolding as a kind of lyric moment or scene. Rich with fierce intelligence and a deep intimacy, Whittall’s sequence of diary-poems unfold and meander, and there’s an ability that I admire about her (or her narrator, alternately) ability to be present, whether discussing the wish to possibly have a baby, the devastation of a break-up, or seeing an elk outside her window at Banff Writing Studio, all while allowing the blend of daily life and writing life to shape and inform. “Form is content, I tell the elk. My girlfriend and I have an arrangement,” she writes, as part of “Neurotic, / Bisexual, Alberta,” “a type of freedom whenever we travel. This makes me cconsider all strangers from a different angle. When I’m the one left at home it makes me sleepless and on edge. I go see Dave read from a new play. I watch Jonathan give a talk. When I’m with a woman, I look only at men, and vice versa. You should know you’re bisexual if you answer the question Are you ever just happy with what you’ve got? I know gender isn’t that simple.”

Across whatever flow or ebb, there is still a larger structure upon, through and within which the assemblage of short pieces can shape, cohere and, in the end, hold, simultaneously composed as document, process and an attempt to find her footing after and through a sequence of upheavals. “THERE IS A BEAR BETWEEN the theatre and the house a literary festival has rented for me.” begins the piece “Sechelt.” “An orange cat outside, I seem to attract them everywhere I go.” As a sequence, the poems assemble across a period of time that includes “abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation,” attempting to articulate and reconcile those gains, experiences and losses, while in the midst of the work of a daily writing life, and odd moments that pool and tide against the shores. “Nadine Gordimer said that writing is making sense of life.” This, as Whittall writes, is her working to make the most sense of it all.